Fools in Schools and Jerks at Work
Making People Useless
The Asshole Factory
Our
economy doesn’t make stuff anymore. So what does
it make?
My
good friend Mara has not one but two graduate degrees. From fine, storied
universities. Surprise, surprise: the only “job” she was able to find was at a
retail store.
Hey—it’s
only minimum wage, but at least she’s working, right? And at a major-league,
blue-chip company, An American icon; an institution; a name every man, woman,
and child in this country knows; an historic company that rings of the American
Dream the world over, besides. Surely, if nothing else, it’s a start.
Perhaps
you’re right. Maybe it isn’t the start she always dreamed of…but at least it is
one. If so…then awaits her at the finish?
What
is Mara’s job like? Her sales figures are monitored…by the microsecond. By hidden cameras and
mics. They listen to her every word; they capture her every movement; that
track and stalk her as if she were an animal; or a prisoner; or both. She’s
jacked into a headset that literally barks algorithmic, programmed “orders” at
her, parroting her own “performance” back to her, telling her how she compares
with quotas calculated…down to the second…for all the hundreds of items in the
store…which recites “influence and manipulation techniques” to her…to use on
unsuspecting customers…that sound suspiciously like psychological warfare. It’s
as if the NSA was following you around……and
it was stuck in your head…telling you what an inadequate failure
you were…psychologically waterboarding you…all day long…every day for the rest
of your life.
Mara’s
boss sits in the back. Monitoring all twelve, or fifteen, or twenty people that
work in the store. On a set of screens. Half camera displays, half
spreadsheets; numbers blinking in real-time. Glued to it like a zombie. Chewing
slowly with her mouth open. Jacked into a headset. A drone-pilot… piloting a
fleet of human drones…pressure-selling disposable mass-made shit…as if it were
luxury yachts…through robo-programmed info-warfare…like zombies…to other
zombies…who look stunned…like they just got laser blasted, cluster-bombed,
shock-and-awed…
WTF?
It’s
bananas. The whole scene is like a maximum-security mental asylum designed by
sadomasochists in a sci-fi movie. If Jeffrey Dahmer, Rasputin, and Michael Bay
designed a “store” together, they couldn’t do any better. Her “job” will begin
to drive her crazy—paranoid, depressed, deluded—in a matter of years if she
continues doing it. No human psyche can bear that kind of relentless,
systematic abuse.
Now.
Note what all the technology and bureaucracy that wonderful, noble company has
invested hundreds of millions in doesn’t ask her to do.
Learn. Think. Reflect. Teach. Inspire. Lead. Connect. Imagine. Create. Grow.
Dream. Actually…serve customers. Heaven forbid. It just beats her over the
head, over and over again, three times a minute, every twenty seconds, with how
much she hasn’t sold;
hasn’t made; hasn’t produced. For her
shitty .0003% commission. According to the quota that’s been set for her.
By her boss. For his boss. For their boss. And so on all the way up the food
chain.
See
my point? Mara’s job isn’t to benefit customers. It isn’t to educate,
understand, listen to, or even to chat
with them. It isn’t to stop them from buying what they don’t want;
to help them find what they might need; to match them with the right stuff.
Nope. It’s merely to push more and more and more and more shit at them…faster,
meaner, and dumber than any sane person would think is humanly possible…using
advanced military technology and techniques… programmed
to abuse her…so she can wage advanced psychological warfare…on her customers. And they
were just suckers, gaping maws, fools, marks. And be yelled at…by a robot…if she doesn’t.
Really?
This is the best
our economy can do? To take the stuff of 21st century warfare and use them them
to…rack up the profit? To turn a bright young woman with two grad degrees…into
a Superprofitable Human Weapon of Mass Consumption…a half-crazed
algorithmically-programmed asshole…a human drone…so even bigger, actually crazy
assholes…can get super-rich…by slinging entire supertankers full of junk…at
people getting poorer at four thousand percent interest a year…by using drones
and bots to wage
psy-warfare against them…so they’re conned into buying too much?
The
economy doesn’t make stuff anymore.
That much you know. So what does it make?
It
makes assholes.
The
Great Enterprise of this age is the Asshole Industry.
And
that’s not just a tragedy. It is something approaching the moral equivalent of
a crime. For it demolishes human potential in precisely the same way as locking
someone innocent up, and throwing away the key.
Consider
Mara again. Who in Christ’s name would design such an inhuman system? Whose
sick joke of an idea is a “store” like that? What do you even call it? Because it’s
surely not a “store”.
Only
a monstrous asshole
of the highest order could assemble such a demonically vampiric bullshit
machine to prey on…everyone.
Customers, managers, workers alike. Such a carefully sophisticated
engine of human misery; of finessed cruelty; all to rake in a few extra pennies
an hour, at the expense of dignity, intelligence, creativity, commitment,
fairness, craft, service, sovereignty…sanity.
The
store is an Asshole Factory.
Allow
me to explain.
What
happens to Mara when she’s “doing her job”? Think about it for a second. She
turns into precisely the
kind of asshole that the heartless dweebs who thought up this
infernal torture-machine no doubt already are. Not because she wants to. But
because she has to.
That’s
exactly what the store was designed
to do. Turn everyone into the same kind of asshole as the assholes
that made it, run it, and benefit from it…want everyone to be.
The
store is an Asshole Factory.
Our
world is now full of Asshole Factories. That’s what the stores, offices,
industrial parks, skyscrapers, malls, low-rise blocks, gleaming headquarters,
whimsically designed corporate campuses, really are.
It’s
the grand endeavor of today. We don’t make stuff
anymore. We make assholes. The Great Enterprise of this age is the
Asshole Industry.
Consider,
for a moment, my tiny hypothesis.
Have
you noticed, lately, that people seem to be more, well, assholish…than before?
That everywhere you go, people seem to be meaner, nastier, dumber, angrier,
more brutish?
Why?
It
is the last and greatest industry left in an economy that has been
impoverished, emptied, hollowed out, drained.
The
Great Enterprise of the Age of Stagnation is the wholesale manufacture not of
great, world-shaking, ground-breaking ideas, inventions, concerns…but of bigger
and bigger assholes.
The
chain-store; the mall; the hypermarket. The corporation; the firm; the
partnership. B-school; law school; med school. The boardroom; the backroom; the
trading floor.
These
are, by and large, Asshole Factories. They don’t make people. Capable of great
things. Who create and build and touch and soar. They make assholes.
They
are designed to disinfect us of our fragility. To cleanse us of our flaws. To
disinfect us of weakness. Love, grace, mercy, longing, forgiveness, passion,
truth, nobility, dreams. Their objective is to stamp all that out; to eradicate
it; to erase it. To replace it with calculation, ruthlessness, self-concern;
gluttony; cruelty; anxiety, despair. By using the most sophisticated technology
ever made to subjugate, oppress, and goad us into being little torturers ourselves.
And
in so doing, they emotionally sterilize us. They psychically traumatize us.
They intellectually castrate us. They socially neuter us. They cheat us of
greatness. That is how they
turn us into assholes.
They
are designed to deprive us into depriving everyone else of the lives we could and have, at our
highest and truest and noblest.
The
assholes haven’t just
taken our incomes, our savings, our careers, our educations. They’ve taken
something far more precious; something priceless. It is our lives—the full,
true lives we should be living—that have been taken from us. And in the gaping
void where the lives we should
be living are, the assholes have deftly inserted carbon copies of…themselves.
When
you think about it that way…is it any wonder that society seems to be stuck?
That the economy seems headed into oblivion? That life for so pretty much
anyone under the age of 35 and/or worth less than $20 million or so appears to
be going…nowhere?
Remember
my friend Mara? She’s probably being piloted like a drone…yelled at by a
bot…three times a minute…into waging advanced techniques of psycho-war…designed to traumatize prisoners…over
and over and over again…right this very second…
Until
she’s cleansed. Perfect. Flawless. Pure. Another gleaming, brand-new asshole,
rolling proudly off the assembly line of the Asshole Factory.
We’re
obedient constructivists. Pragmatists. Rationalists. So you probably want to
know: what can we do
about it?
It’s
pretty simple.
Don’t
be an asshole. Remember the Asshole Factories? Here’s a secret: they’re
churning out assholes by the millions. And so should you bravely decide to be
an asshole, what you’ll really
be is just another interchangeable, forgettable, rapidly depreciating
commodity.
So
who should you be?
Be
yourself.
The person you were meant to
be. Whether you believe in heaven or the inferno, freedom or fate, the simple
fact is: each and every one of us was put here to be something greater than
Just Another Asshole stealing pennies from his neighbors to pay off Even Bigger
Assholes.
So
let me say it again. Don’t be an asshole. Be
yourself. The miracle of being that you were meant to be. A person
that, consumed with passion, seared with happiness, aglow with meaning, brings
forth all that is great, noble, and true in the world, and so, with love,
mercy, and wisdom, lifts every life that you meet into the light.
Thank
you and goodbye.
Half of 25-year-olds live with parents, 1 million college students ‘Sugar Babies’, 31% of adjunct profs in poverty: Demanding obvious economic solutions yet?
American so-called “higher education” does exactly what it should: prepare college students for the real world. On 2015 Earth, students must learn the Orwellian condition that what we use for money is created as debt, producing an economy adding negative numbers forever with “developed” “modern” nations now $50 trillion in debt, the top 1% having more assets than the 99% combined, and the US top 1% has more assets than the bottom 90%.
Of course, the obvious solution is to stop creating what we use for money as a negative number owed to privately-owned banks, and have government create debt-free money for the direct payment of public goods and services. A preliminary cost-benefit analysis shows each and every US household would near-instantly achieve millionaire status with this upgrade.
But college students must pass the Emperor’s New Clothes test before escaping their asset-hole banksters (as must American civics students of all ages). Our condition:
- Class of 2015 students average $35,000 in debt, with the total for 2015 graduates nearly $70 billion: more than ten times the amount from just 20 years ago. The average time to pay this debt is now 15 years (almost age 40).
- half of US 25-year-olds live with their parents, more than twice the number from 15 years ago.
- Over one million US college students are “Sugar babies”: selling sex as part-time employment. The UK has the same condition (here, here).
- 31% of US adjunct professors live in poverty. 4-minute video from Brave New Films:
- decaying infrastructure getting uglier from “deferred maintenance,”
- real unemployment near 25% with most families demanding both parents work longer and longer hours,
- real inflation well above official reports,
- US poverty of 20% among children, 40% for living at least a year in poverty,
- 72% of California students in schools with over half the children classified as “socio-economically disadvantaged,”
- a .01% oligarch class that “legally” hide $20 to $30 trillion in offshore tax havens,
- a rigged-casino economy designed for “peak inequality,”
- “too big to fail” banks demand public subsidies (so-called “bailouts”) while gambling with over $200 TRILLION in derivatives,
- these “too big to fail/jail” banks deriving most of their income from subsidies and apparent market manipulations,
- Daily and never-ending Orwellian criminal-complicit lies of corporate media.
Please understand that I represent likely hundreds of thousands of professionals making factual claims with objective evidence anyone with a high school-level of education can verify.
I have three academic papers to walk any reader through these facts; an assignment for high school economics students, one for Advanced Placement Macroeconomics students, and a paper for the Claremont Colleges’ recent academic conference:
- Teaching critical thinking to high school students: Economics research/presentation
- Debt-damned economics: either learn monetary reform, or kiss your assets goodbye
- Seizing an alternative: Bankster looting: fundamental fraud that “debt” is “money”
Note: I make all factual assertions as a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History, with all economics factual claims receiving zero refutation since I began writing in 2008 among Advanced Placement Macroeconomics teachers on our discussion board, public audiences of these articles, and international conferences. I invite readers to empower their civic voices with the strongest comprehensive facts most important to building a brighter future. I challenge professionals, academics, and citizens to add their voices for the benefit of all Earth’s inhabitants.
**
Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS, for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at Carl_Herman@post.harvard.edu
Note: Examiner.com has blocked public access to my articles on their site (and from other whistleblowers), so some links in my previous work are blocked. If you’d like to search for those articles other sites may have republished, use words from the article title within the blocked link. Or, go to http://archive.org/web/, paste the expired link into the box, click “Browse history,” then click onto the screenshots of that page for each time it was screen-shot and uploaded to webarchive. I’ll update as “hobby time” allows; including my earliest work from 2009 to 2011 (blocked author pages: here, here).
From Washington’s
Blog @ http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/11/half-of-25-year-olds-live-with-parents-1-million-college-students-sugar-babies-31-of-adjunct-profs-in-poverty-demanding-obvious-economic-solutions-yet.html
For more information about the brainwashing mind control
of ‘education’ systems see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/education
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through ‘Older Posts’ at the end of each section
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